From the Editors

Transitions

With this 2013 volume of Poe Studies, we mark a double passage: from one coeditor to another and from one publisher to another.

Outgoing coeditor Scott Peeples has partnered with Jana Argersinger since 2008—fulfilling that commitment with lively insight, warm collegiality, and a sharp eye for innovations in the field of Poe studies and nineteenth-century US literature at large. Sessions he and Argersinger organized under the journal’s aegis for American Literature Association conferences sparked conversation on such Poe-related issues as violence and such broad, timely questions as the role of single-author journals in the shifting landscape of academic publishing. From the fruits of such projects, the coeditors shaped Poe Studies issues covering a wide span of literary and interdisciplinary approaches: from trauma studies, queer theory, and political culture to animal studies, narrative theory, and the history of science. At the outset of Professor Peeples’s tenure, we began publishing with Wiley-Blackwell; in the course of 2012–13, we jointly negotiated a new agreement with Johns Hopkins University Press and Project MUSE—an achievement to which his record as coeditor was vital.

As Peeples moves into a consulting role alongside former editor Alexander Hammond, it is our good fortune to announce that Leland Person has joined Argersinger as coeditor. Professor Person, a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati and former member of the Poe Studies editorial board, comes to this new collaboration as a distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century literature with particular expertise on Poe. He has contributed to Poe scholarship a range of articles on such matters as gender, sexuality, and race. Books include Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne; Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity; and the coedited essay collection Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship. And with J. Gerald Kennedy, he is currently editing The American Novel to 1870 in the twelve-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English. Long active in the life of author societies and their journals, including the Poe Studies Association and the Edgar Allan Poe Review, he has served as president of both the Hawthorne Society and the Henry James Society, and he continues to sit on their executive committees. Professor Person professes himself pleased to join the editorial team, and we are greatly pleased to have him.

Author Studies at ALA

At the 2013 American Literature Association conference, Poe Studies sponsored two linked roundtable sessions titled “What’s the Author Got to Do with It?” These sessions fostered discussion about an issue that is fundamental to the single-author journal as a critical genre: the persistence, even re-emergence, of “the author” as a critical and scholarly focus after Barthes, Foucault, and company. The roundtables were well attended and the conversation, both in the sessions themselves and in the hallways afterward, was animated.

Access to Poe Studies

In the near future, access not only to the journal’s current issue but also to the full run of back issues will be available through Project MUSE (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/poe_studies/). Electronic access to volumes 1 through 45 will continue to be available at the Wiley-Blackwell website for institutions that already hold perpetual licenses.